The presidential candidates discussed the health system in Colombia in the middle of the face-to-face meeting of SEMANA and Time.
Vicky Dávila, director of SEMANA, questioned the amount that doctors should earn in the country.
Federico Gutiérrez did not refer to a specific figure, but asked that they have higher remuneration. “The medical and care staff must have a good remuneration, also according to their specialty,” said ‘Fico’.
He said that they must have bonding guarantees, criticizing that in the current system they do not have them. “Most do not have benefits and all the possibilities”, commented the candidate of the Team for Colombia. He clarified that if he is president, he would discuss it with the medical unions.
For his part, Gustavo Petro said that supposedly in his mayor’s office in Bogotá he had already implemented a model in which he paid general practitioners 6 million pesos to visit the capital’s neighborhoods, while the EPS paid 2,700,000 with specialization.
Íngrid Betancourt did not give an exact figure either, because according to her that is “populism”, although she clarified that the problem is the informality of health people. “They have to accumulate contracts to be able to more or less cope and face their daily lives. What we have to look at is how we are going to correspond to them not only so that they have a decent job, but so that they have all the social benefits that they do not have”pointed out the Green Oxygen candidate.
Petro added that if what is sought is that a doctor or any person who works in the health system can have a good salary and benefits in an indefinite term contract, they must be a direct employee of the hospital.
He says that the problem is when the entity is public and employs him, and the EPS does not respond for that salary. “He’s bottomless, he can’t do it. That is why the public-private hospital has to bring the staff to the level of slavery and outsourcing, regardless of their professional quality,” he commented.
And that the only way to achieve decent employment, according to him, is that there are no intermediaries. “There is no other way,” he said. “It is that the State pays directly with health resources to the public hospital,” added the leader of Colombia Humana.
Regarding the issue of health, Federico Gutiérrez said that he would not completely end the EPS, as Gustavo Petro proposes. He was blunt that the one that is not working will liquidate it. “EPS that does not comply with the community, is liquidated,” he said.
He gave as an example that in his administration in Medellín he received Savia Salud, which has a mixed nature, that is, public-private. ‘Fico’ said that he received it with almost 800,000 million pesos of accumulated losses. “We recovered it and we did not put at risk the more than 1,700,000 users that the system had, who were the poorest and most vulnerable in the department,” said the former mayor.
That is why he asked that they be strengthened and that the system work for (the) people who need it most with a quality service. He assures that if the EPS had been liquidated, what was at stake was the health of thousands of people. “What we did was save lives,” Gutierrez said.
Petro disputed it and said that “it is more of the same”. He pointed out that 105 EPS have been liquidated in the country and that is why he would end them in an eventual government of his. In addition, to solve system problems such as queues, lack of guarantees for health personnel, among other problems, this intermediation must be removed.
“Intermediation is called EPS, some private entities that exclusively manage public resources, but it is rhetoric,” Petro commented.
Íngrid Betancourt assured that they deviated from the subject. He brought up the issue of corruption once more and mentioned that many times the EPS are given to “friends”, as a favor to the rulers and congressmen. “We’re not talking regarding the problem,” he said.
“Why are we going to talk regarding the EPS if finally what we have to confront once once more are the effects of the machinery. There we are in the middle of the debate, this is a problem of corruption”, criticized Betancourt.
